There’s no such thing as illegal immigrants anymore (except in the immigration statutes). They’re to be called “undocumenteds.” As if they’re merely folks who momentarily misplaced the paperwork. Although they’re not even citizens of the country, they’ve become a powerful pressure group in our politics. As well they might be. If all the “undocumenteds” lived in one place, they’d constitute a population as great as that of the key elector-vote State of Ohio. Maybe greater.

Another politician in 2014 uttered now-verboten words similar to those spoken by Bill Clinton.

“Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules watch others flout the rules,” griped Barack Obama — sounding for all the world like one of those bitter “Make America Great Again” yahoos clinging to their guns and Bibles out in flyover country. Illegals, said Obama, take American jobs at cut-rate pay, thereby undermining the most economically vulnerable Americans.

Given the open-borders, sanctuary-city madness now consuming his party, Obama wouldn’t dare say such words today. Recent years have brought a sea change. Americans are now gringos even north of the border, in their own land.

It used to be that the big-corporations and Republican-aligned Chamber of Commerce types were the ones enamored of cheap-labor immigration. In fact, not that long ago their mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal, editorialized for a constitutional amendment declaring: “The United States shall have open borders.”

The Republican establishment is still keen on cheap-labor immigration. But now it has a not-so-silent partner: the Democratic Party. Today, a Democrat chorus — with the city of Trenton and the governor of New Jersey among the voices — belts out the old GOP immigration tune. Democrats, of course, are interested in the political constituency, not the cheap labor.

In the new scheme of things, any insistence on borders is prima facie evidence of bigotry. Borders — at least America’s borders, not other countries’ — exist merely as lines on maps, not as anything enforceable. If you want enforced borders, move to Mexico. It has stiff sentences in hell-hole prisons — two-years or longer — for border-transgressing Yanquis.

Here’s a dare. Go to a campus and try to make a speech supporting the proposition that immigration policy “must serve our national interest.” Good luck surviving the hornet swarm you’ll stir up there. Who’d argue such a point today? That tweeting moron, Trump?

Those in fact were the words of the late Democratic congresswoman and civil rights leader Barbara Jordan. Immigration policy “must serve our national interest,” and it can do so only if immigration laws are enforced, she said. Such words today would get her hooted off the podium by the George Soros-bankrolled Black Shirt progressive militzia.

Back in the day — and not that far back actually — Jordan dared to say this: “Allowing a mass influx of low-skilled foreign nationals to violate our laws is a bad proposition.” She went on:

“Bad for American citizens who see their wages driven downward and are vulnerable to a dangerous criminal element; bad for legal immigrants who played by the rules and saw that effort mocked by others who essentially cheated and were rewarded...”

Such common-sense words today would have her party clutching its pearls and shrieking: “Eeeek!”

Jordan’s words today would necessitate land-grant legislation for more “safe spaces” and a Snowflakes Protection Act.

To those who argued that illegals work hard and pay taxes, Jordan responded: “Let me be clear. That is not enough.” They must, at a minimum, comply with the law in the way they enter the United States, she insisted. It may be necessary before quoting Jordan any further to give a “micro-aggression” warning. College students of dainty sensitivity may want to repair to their safe spaces before reading further.

Jordan said sane immigration policy serves two simple objectives. One: “People who should not get in are kept out.” And Two: Those “who are judged deportable are required to leave.”

She was not the first African-American to note the downside effects of illegal immigration on struggling Americans. The great abolitionist newspaper editor Frederick Douglass, a self-educated former slave, complained in 1871 that there’s always a powerful pro-immigration lobby seeking “cheap labor.”

Immigration, he said, was forcing whites near the bottom of the pyramid into lousy jobs once left to blacks and leaving blacks utterly without any means of supporting themselves at all.

America in the dawning era of industrialization wants cheap labor, said Douglass, wants it from Ireland, wants it from China, wants it from “anywhere in the world” it can get it. But America doesn’t want to give those new factory jobs to blacks, who are surely owed them after all those years of slavery, he observed.

Today’s elitist progressives cherry-pick pro-immigration views from Douglass but gloss over words of his, such as these in 1853: “Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived immigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place...” — i.e., to America.

Noting the rising tide of immigration, Douglass further observed: “It is evident, painfully evident, to every reflecting mind, that the means of living for colored men are becoming more and more precarious and limited.”

Not so many years ago, the Democratic Party and labor unions reflected such concerns. No mas. The unions today are largely public-sector entities and as such are the Stepin Fetchits of bureaucracy. And so they dance to the tune of the Democratic Party’s fiddle.

For further explanation, inspect than the money trail. Since 1990, four public employee unions alone — SEI, NEA, AFSCME and AFT — have given Democrat candidates in federal elections $620 million of campaign donations.

The four unions all rank in the top 10 of the 100 biggest political donors. In contrast, the supposedly all-powerful NRA ranks 94th on the list of top 100 donors, giving a comparatively measly $19 million to Republicans and $4 million to Democrats over the period. (Figures from non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.)

Congresswoman Jordan foresaw the ominous trend early on. She expressed fears that “opportunistic politicians” would one day court the political support of immigrants “with promises of generous social services benefits.” How prescient. Will Gov. Jerry Brown next be offering Tijuana’s 1.7 million residents free tuition to the University of California San Diego?

Most African-American officials today have fallen lockstep into line with Massa Democrat Party’s de facto dogma in support of porous-border Latino immigration. Such immigration is a partisan boon to the party, or so the party calculates.

But there’s little evidence it’s a boon in any way, shape or form to the party’s long-time most loyal constituency, blacks. Harvard economist George Borjas concluded in a study that immigration (legal and illegal) reduces U.S. wages by up to $118 billion a year and individual paychecks by as much as 3.7 percent. The African-American unemployment rate, meanwhile, continues to exceed the Hispanic rate, and by a significant margin — 6.9 percent vs. 4.1 percent for February.

Jordan headed a commission on immigration policy which in 1995 made these recommendations:

• Tighten up border enforcement and take measures to deter businesses from hiring illegals.

Such proposals today surely would occasion a gathering of angry multitudes on the Washington Mall, with mass wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. Bill Clinton would be well advised as he goes about his public appearances today not to remind audiences that he fully endorsed all of these recommendations.

When the commission reported its recommendations, Barbara Jordon spoke these words: “It is literally a matter of who we are as a nation and who we become as a people. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. One people. The American people.”

Critics today no doubt would hasten to say that she was only trying to “Make America white again.”

Her words today would occasion apoplectic institutional meltdowns. Only puddles would be left where campuses and CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post once stood.

You may be inclined to lament that it seems no longer to be your grandfather’s country. Or maybe not your father’s, either. If that’s what you think, the Swamp has a message for you: Mala suerte.

Or as it used to be said when English was the dominant language here: Tough t---y.